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Power BI Designer
Long has the question been asked “Which Microsoft tool do I use for dashboards?”. SSRS, Excel, PowerView, Report Builder and PerformancePoint are all candidates. But that has all changed, and the...
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Microsoft product roadmap now public
Ever wonder about Microsoft’s product roadmap? With Microsoft rapidly releases products and services, they realized the need to provide better transparency. Well wonder no more! They have released...
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What is Advanced Analytics?
Advanced Analytics, or Business Analytics, refers to future-oriented analysis that can be used to help drive changes and improvements in business practices. It is made up of four phases: Descriptive...
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Power BI Made Simple
In an effort to understand Power BI and all the products it encompasses, I have made this slide deck to hopefully make things easy for you: Power BI Made Simple. It is a presentation that covers all...
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Presentation slides for “Building a Big Data Solution”
Thanks to everyone who attended my session “Building a Big Data Solution” (Building an Effective Data Warehouse Architecture with Hadoop, Cloud and MPP) for Pragmatic Works today. The abstract for my...
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Operational Data Store (ODS) Defined
I see a lot of confusion on what exactly is an Operational Data Store (ODS). While it can mean different things to different people, I’ll explain what I see as the most common definition. First let...
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Creating a large data warehouse in Azure
Microsoft Azure provides you two options when hosting your SQL Server-based data warehouse: Microsoft Azure SQL Database and SQL Server in Azure Virtual Machine. Which one is appropriate based on the...
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What is a data lake?
A “data lake” is a storage repository, usually in Hadoop, that holds a vast amount of raw data in its native format until it is needed. It’s a great place for investigating, exploring, experimenting,...
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Types of NoSQL databases
A NoSQL database provides a mechanism for storage and retrieval of data that is modeled in means other than the tabular relations used in relational databases. NoSQL is often interpreted as...
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TechEd is now Microsoft Ignite
In case you were wondering what happened to the TechEd conferences, Microsoft is now bringing together the best of previously individual events – the Management Summit, the Exchange, SharePoint, Lync,...
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Azure SQL Data Warehouse
Analytics Platform System (APS) is Microsoft’s massively parallel processing (MPP) data warehouse technology. This has only been available as an on-prem solution (see video Overview of Microsoft...
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Azure Data Lake
At the recent Microsoft Build Developer Conference, Executive Vice President Scott Guthrie announced the Azure Data Lake. It is a new flavor of Azure Storage which can handle streaming data (low...
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SQL Server 2016 public preview arriving this summer
SQL Server 2016 was recently announced. Top new features include: Always Encrypted protects data at rest and in motion. With Always Encrypted, SQL Server can perform operations on encrypted data and...
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How an MPP appliance solution can improve your future
Massive parallel processing (MPP) is the future for data warehousing. So what is MPP? SQL Server is a Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) solution, which essentially means it uses one server. MPP...
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What is Microsoft Azure Stream Analytics?
Microsoft Azure Stream Analytics (ASA) is a fully managed cloud service for real-time processing of streaming data. ASA makes it easy to set up real-time analytic computations on data flowing in from...
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What is Polyglot Persistence?
Polyglot Persistence is a fancy term to mean that when storing data, it us best to use multiple data storage technologies, chosen based upon the way data is being used by individual applications or...
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Microsoft Azure Data Catalog
Just announced is the Microsoft Azure Data Catalog, which is an enterprise metadata catalog / portal for the self-service discovery of data sources. It becomes available on Monday next week, July 13,...
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Cortana Analytics Suite
Yesterday at the Microsoft World Wide Partner Conference in Orlando Microsoft announced the Cortana Analytics Suite, which is a new package of data storage, information management, machine learning,...
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Analytics Platform System (APS) AU4 released
The Analytics Platform System (APS), which is a renaming of the Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW), has just released an appliance update (AU4), which is sort of like a service pack, except that it includes...
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Hadoop and Microsoft
In my Introduction to Hadoop I talked about the basics of Hadoop. In this post, I wanted to cover some of the more common Hadoop technologies and tools and show how they work together, in addition to...
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